My BYU Story

 

I retired on the last day of April, after almost 18 years as editorial director at BYU Studies, which has given me a lot to think about. I’ve had an unusual career, which ended very differently than it started. But I have had a long and recurring relationship with BYU that has blessed my life in many ways.

When they inaugurated Shane Reese as BYU’s 14th president last year, I checked a few dates and realized that I have now been a student or an employee during the tenure of half of BYU’s 14 presidents. I guess that makes me old.

So, let me tell you a bit about my BYU experience. It didn’t get off to a great start. I graduated from Weber High in 1974 (yes, we’re having our 50-year reunion this summer) and was awarded two four-year, full-tuition scholarships to BYU—one from the university and the other a National Merit scholarship. Sorry to say, I turned them both down. Although my older sister was a BYU student, I didn’t have any friends coming to Provo, and I was not the adventurous type, so I joined some good friends and spent my freshman year at Utah State in frigid Logan.

That next summer I was called to serve a mission in northern Germany. After I’d been there about six months, my companion and I were “tracting” one cold morning in the tallest apartment building in Norderstedt, a suburb of Hamburg. Nobody was home, so my mind was just wandering as we walked from door to silent door. College was the furthest thing from my mind. But all of a sudden, out of nowhere, a voice spoke to me. It wasn’t an audible voice, but it gave me a very clear message in specific words that I can still remember to this day. This is the only time in my life this has ever happened. “Roger,” it said (I find it interesting the voice didn’t call me Elder Terry), “you don’t want to go back to Utah State. Go to BYU.” That was it. I hadn’t even thought about changing schools, but the message was not just clear; it was true. I didn’t want to go back to Utah State. I had spent the previous summer on BYU’s campus and had quietly fallen in love with the school. This was the year before the new MTC was built, and the LTM (someone told me that stood for Longest Two Months) was all over Provo that summer. My district lived in Heritage Halls (the girls’ dorms), but we had class in Amanda Knight Hall, on University Avenue, so we got to walk through campus every morning and every night, and it made quite an impression. It became home, I suppose. The last few days before we flew, the university needed the girls’ dorms again, so we got moved, with about 200 other missionaries, to the gym in the old Brigham Young Academy. That was quite an experience.

Anyway, after the voice’s message, I started making plans. My mom got me accepted to BYU and transferred my credits. Several months later, I was in a district with a couple of elders who became my good friends. They and two other elders in our mission had already planned to room together at BYU, so I asked if I could join them. They said yes, if I could find a place that would hold five instead of four. My sister was kind enough to track down an old house on 8th East, just south of campus, and got us signed up. Rick, one of the roommates, will be forever grateful that I barged in on their foursome, because he met his future wife in our new student ward, and they are now in Fiji, serving a mission together.

I sampled a number of majors before finally settling on German (accounting ran in the family but not in my blood). I didn’t want to teach German. I’d done that for three years at the MTC but didn’t want to make a career of it. I thought, “What can I do with a degree in German besides teach?” The answer I came up with was international business. So I applied to BYU’s MBA program and was accepted. I think the most important thing (maybe the only important thing) I learned in the MBA program was that I’m not the corporate type. Hmm. What to do?

Well, I heard through the grapevine that the Business Management Department needed someone to fill an empty faculty slot in operations management for a year. I had done well in operations management, so I went and talked with Bill Giauque, the head of the operations management faculty, and he offered me the job. That one-year slot somehow stretched into nine years. It was during my first two years of teaching that I met and married my wife, who had returned from a mission and was in her last year at BYU, so that was an added bonus of staying at BYU after graduating twice.

After teaching for a few years at what had now been renamed the Marriott School of Management, someone found out I like to write, so the dean’s office asked me to edit the school’s alumni magazine, which was called Exchange back then. I learned editing on the fly. I would send my edits to Byron Bronk, an excellent copy editor up at Publications and Graphics, and he would send them back with red marks all over them. “Oh, so that’s how you do that,” I would say to myself. And that was pretty much the only editing education I’ve ever had. After a couple of years of editing Exchange, I was asked to take an administrative position as “director of publications” for the Marriott School. I worked directly for the dean’s office. And I still had no idea where all of this was going.

After I had spent two years as director of publications at the Marriott School, the BYU human resources people started sniffing around. They called the dean’s office and said, “What’s this director of publications position? It doesn’t exist.” They’d apparently created it out of thin air and funded it with “soft” money (donations) without university permission, so that was the end of that. Nine years on a one-year contract. Not bad.

I spent the next year working for a small agency in Provo and then started my own small business, producing a wacky day planner, writing fiction, doing freelance editing, and finding whatever work I could to make ends meet. My wife and I refer to those six years as the period of my life when I was “self-unemployed.” Lots to do, but not much money. After a couple of years, I found out that the Marriott School needed an editor for Exchange, so I returned for almost four years just to edit the alumni magazine on a very part-time basis.

It was now 1999. The associate dean I had worked with retired, and the replacement wanted to go a different direction. My little business was also winding down (the new Palm Pilot eventually killed the day planner market), and I had kids who were going to need braces and a lot more, so I started looking for a permanent job. In a rather miraculous way (a good story but too long to tell here), I was hired by Church magazines as a senior editor, even though my editing background was not all that impressive.

I spent the next seven and a half years at the Liahona and then the Ensign. In 2006, Jack Welch offered me the job of editorial director at BYU Studies, and I jumped at the opportunity. I still considered BYU my home. And the past almost 18 years have now flown by. It has been a great place to work, but it’s time to retire.

I came to BYU in 1977, when Dallin Oaks was university president. I was both a student and faculty member under Jeffrey R. Holland, who has been a good friend to me over the years. And I have worked at BYU for at least part of the tenure of the next five university presidents.

I will be forever grateful that a voice spoke to me on a cold winter morning in Norderstedt, Germany, and told me to go to BYU. I can’t imagine what my life would have been like if I had not followed that voice.